What they said about ... Holocaust memorial

The first 10 of 2,751 stark, grey, concrete slabs were erected in the heart of Berlin on Saturday in a ceremony to mark the beginning of a project to build Germany's first Holocaust memorial.

The memorial - which has been designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman to look like a vast graveyard - will cost an estimated €28m (£20m) and will be officially opened on May 8, 2005, to mark the 60th anniversary of Germany's surrender in the second world war.

The memorial is to be built on the "ugliest space in the centre of Berlin - which was first a war wound, then where the wall was built", said Die Welt, and it will cover "an area almost the size of three football pitches stretching between the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamerplatz". The pillars, each five metres high, will be installed at varying depths, so that they rise to different levels, reported the Deutsche Presse Agentur, which added that "Eisenman once compared his plans ... to a waving cornfield".

Speaking to Stern magazine, Eisenman said the rows of tightly packed slabs would evoke the feeling of being trapped that Jewish people felt when they were sent to the concentration camps. The design would force people to confront the past by evoking feelings of loss and isolation - "as alone as the people were in Auschwitz".

The project had been the subject of intense debate and had taken 15 years to finally get under way, noted the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "It was the result of a long discussion which illustrated the difficulties that exist when a nation tries to remember the biggest crime in its history ... There were arguments about the location - did it really have to go in the middle of the city? About the meaning - should others as well as the Jews be considered? About the form - can the Holocaust even be expressed through a construction like this?"

But, said the paper, throughout it all, the architect was determined it would be a place of quiet: "A quiet to remind people that the Germans remained silent in 1933. A quiet, which would make people talk about who they are and what they think of their country. It is the beginning of a new way of speaking."

In the Berliner Zeitung, Torsten Harmsen also looked beyond the controversy. "The break in the cityscape symbolises the break in history," he wrote. The memorial "should confront people, in fact provoke them. It can't be any other way".